"Bridge this is engineering one you are go for warp."

"Bridge this is Alpha team deck D waiting for your signal"

The Omen thrummed with waiting power, pulsing with the anticipation of the warp core warmed up and ready to fire. All around the ship distant stars winked slowly from the blackness of space shining down and through the forward viewscreen of the Omen's bridge.

Men and women in various stages of dress sat on the bridge at their old command stations waiting for directions, hands ready and poised over their controls. A distant red nebula glowed gently, a thousand lightyears high and a thousand lightyears long., its burning red light filtering through the forward view screen with the ret, lighting up half of the disgraced admiral's face, and one side of his massive, mechanical power armor.

Beside him Emperor Avex bathed in the bloody light eyes cold and hard like that of his father.

"Lady Vox to bridge, the cloaking skin is operational, you are go for warp."

Captain Vir flexed his fingers against the back of the command chair, the servos in his hands whirring slightly, the strength of his grip causing the chair to creak.

"Thank you for accompanying us, Emperor."

Emperor Avex chuckled darkly, "If I had turned down an opportunity to cause trouble on a cosmic level, than I wouldn't be deserving of my title, now would I."

Adam smiled, but he did not laugh.

This was serious.

This operation was simultaneously the smartest and the dumbest thing he had ever done. Like Schrodinger's cat, but instead of being alive or dead, it would be stupid or not stupid, and no one would know until it was all over. If it worked it wasn't stupid, and if it didn't work it would be the dumbest thing anyone in the galaxy had ever done.

What were they doing?

Attempting to steal alien technology right out from under God's nose.

Or at least that was the equivalent.

If he was being honest with himself, he knew there was no slipping past the architect. They didn't know much about the strange godlike being that controlled the Makers, but he wasn't willing to make a plan that assumed the architect didn't know absolutely everything. So his plan hinged more on the fact that the architect wouldn't involve himself, as had been the pattern thus far.

Hopefully their involvement was to minor to call the god down upon them. Honestly his greatest hope was that the architect would find their machinations amusing and let it go just to see what happened, but otherwise he was hoping and praying that the architect would simply ignore them with bigger things to do.

But that was the risk they were taking.

Making assumptions about cosmic beings was not exactly the best foundation to base ones plans on, but this was all he had, and his generals agreed with him that soemthing must be done.

"Broadcast transmission to the rest of the ship, I want to talk to the crew."

"Yes sir."

He stepped forward and took a seat in his command chair, just big enough to allow him to sit inside the massive SE armor.

As he sat he could feel a sudden hum of power, and knew that Fealty was watching with anticipation. The AI was mute and did not speak, but he could still tell when its fabricated intelligence was growing excited. It knew what they were about to do, and it was ready.

The Comms officer nodded to him, and he straightened up.

"Crew of the Omen, this is your captain speaking." All across the ship , newly installed Holoports would be showing a life sized 3D rendered projection of him as he spoke. He wasn't entirely sure how useful the technology was, but he was rich and they had reminded him of star wars, so he had them installed.

"You men and women have been with me since the beginning. You have fought at my side as part of the UNSC, and followed me even when it changed your lives for good. A lot of you have left your families, and your loved ones, and your status behind to be part of the crew during these dark times. Each and every one of you have proven your metal, and your loyalty. I owe you more than you could ever imagine and without you none of this would have been possible. Every day I sit here on my chair and ask you to pull off impossible tasks, and every time I have asked, you have done the impossible. I stand on the shoulders of giants and without you I will fall. It seems to me, unfair to ask you for a miracle." Aboard the ship there was nothing but silence and the thrum of the warp core.

" But today... we storm the pearly gates and liberate the wings from archangels."

He paused for a moment looking around as if he could meet the eyes of everyone on board the ship at once.

"Good Luck, Admiral out."

The comms station cut the feed, and he sat back in his chair.

He turned in the quiet of the bridge to see Maverick sitting at a spare station. She had shaved the sides of her head, but left the top long, which was now plated in one long braid down her neck like a Viking. White Drev warp paint had been applied to her face, following the invisible contours of her UV stripes. She raised an eyebrow at him.

"What."

"Dramatic much?"

"You know I have ALWAYS had a flare for drama."

She rolled her eyes but let him continue adjusting herself in her seat.

The rest of the crew did the same, their faces grim, their eyes set forward, their hands white knuckled against their station controls.

Adam took a few deep breaths, sucking in air quickly before slowly pulling on his helmet. There was a snap and a hiss as the lock engaged creating an air-tight seal around his head.

LOCK ENGAGED: INITALIZING

His helmet visor lit up running quickly through vitals, targeting system, and shields before eventually falling back into a dull hum. Fealty pulsed through his armor again, and he could feel the interface from the suit rolling down through the SE exosuit into his hands and bones. All of a sudden his body and the suit were no longer separate. The gloves that rested against the chair arms were now his hands, the bottom of his boots were his bare feet touching the deck ."

"Omen, you are go for launch."

It occurred to him only after the warp sequencing began that Fealty had intentionally thrown a vocal modulation over his voice to make it sound deeper?

Not only did the AI have a flare for the dramatic, but apparently, he didn't think Adam's own voice was badass enough.

He would have frowned about it, but by the time the thoughts had run the course in his head, the warp sequence had been engaged, following the beacon to where they would find Adham and the makers. None of them were entirely sure where this was going to take them, none of them were even sure it was the right place, but they could certainly hope.

This was all they had after all.

And he'd be damned if he was going to miss an opportunity.

Outside the view screen the universe seemed to collapse in on itself, the stars were reflected and then refracted back in on themselves repeating over and over again as the bridge itself began to twist and spin around him, folding back and in. Adam's hands curled in on themselves his stomach churning with the sheer power of the ship.

This warp would be the most powerful warp ever attempted in the history of space travel.

The warp was so far away that the location didn't even appear on star maps of the known universe. Wherever this location was it was outside the range of the observable universe in either the Milky way or Andromeda.

They were flying into this blind.

The fusion core was being stretched to its max, and the warp core was.... Putting out power that no one thought it would ever use.

The ability of the A-1 class engine to travel across the universe and back was only theoretical. It had never been attempted.

But now they were going to find out.

The warp dampeners were no match for what came next, a squeezing and pulling sensation as his body was split into a thousand fractals, stretched to impossible lengths and then compressed into a microscopic point. His brain rebelled and his body twitched as he lost all bodily control. He would have compared the sensation to G-lock if he could have created a coherent thought. Metal creaked and groaned screaming as the ship underwent a strain so intense it was all steel could do not to buckle. The only thing left functioning was his brain stem as they reached the max point of the warp, the moment where they would either make it, or break.

Deep inside the ship, the warp core screamed crackling with dark blue energy. The laws of physics time space and gravity erupted, and suddenly the Omen was gone, vanished from the field of stars.

Adam came to with a jolt that felt like he had been hit by a ca, throwing him against the restraints of his chair. Already pulled tight due to his SE armor, and his nearly 450 kilogram weight with the armor on, one of the buckles snapped violently and he was sent crashing into the railing which twisted and screamed under the impact leaving him lying half on the upper deck and half dangling out over the command floor.

The violent warp lasted no more than a few seconds, but the carnage it caused was notable.

SYSTEM REBOOT

Adam groaned softly once as the screen before his eyes blinked back to life.

The suit initiated a full restart as he took stock of himself.

Most of his internal organs had taken a holiday, but that was something he didn't have to worry about.

Inside his helmet a thin line of drool ran down his chin.

He licked his lips once before crawling back to his hands and knees and then staggering to his feet.

The Fealty armor had provided him with some manner of cover against the warp. All around him most of the crew had passed out completely, dangling in their chairs with pale white faces.

Maverick was the only one groaning.

"Deploy medical team."

Somewhere on the ship, Dr Krill was being awoken from a temporary , medically induced Coma and let out of the warp tank which had been made specifically for this purpose. He had concluded that the strain on his body would likely bee too much, and that he would need extra help in getting through a warp that powerful. Narobi had built the chamber that housed him, and now, he would be feeling better than the rest of them

Adam had no doubt after an event like that that at least one member of the crew likely had a heart attack or some other major medical event in response.

The crew was beginning to shift now, waking up from their warp induced nap.

Adam's vision was finally beginning to level out, and two images turned into one.

The dizziness was subsiding, and he lifted his head to find.

Awe

....

The scene before him could not have been described in words and was barely comprehensible to his brain as.... As something the human mind could possibly comprehend or see . Golden light spilled in through the front viewscreen bathing them all in a glorious sunlit glow.

The color was pure, like fire but.....

It was hard to explain

If joy had been a color, it would have been this.

And outside that window... a dream, a fleeting thought, a surreal painting, and an unarticulated wish.

At the center of all of this was a star unlike any other star he had ever witnessed. Light from stars can be yellow to red to blue, and most anything in between but this..... this star was somehow different. The golden hue was not simply his brain interpreting it that way, but it was true, the light itself seemed to.... Glitter?

But was that even possible?

He didn't think so.

And the star was far to big to be the color it was. It should have been a red giant, or a blue giant at the very least but somehow it wasn't. It was the largest star he had ever seen, and somehow, it glowed white gold and around it there churned two massive rings of incomprehensible size, clearly man or entity-made.

Beyond those rings orbited planets, hundreds of them, maybe more, and they didn't all orbit on the same axis. They orbited vertically and horizontally and diagonally. Between all of that rolled clouds of dust, creating a glittering blue haze. Little pinpricks of red light winked inside the mist and he realized..... those were smaller stars.

It was.

Completely incomprehensible.

Completely impossible.

What he was seeing here and now was... well it was beyond all laws of nature. That much matter should not have been able to coexist like that in that sort of space doing those sorts of things. The orbits of the planets should have been impossible, pulled into each other by their own gravity wells. The massive rings should have collapsed in on themselves and down onto the star's surface. The blue nebulae should not have existed at all blown away by solar winds or sucked into a gravity well.

This place.

This entity.

Was not scientifically possible to any stretch of the imagination .

Yet there she was, one massive sun, two massive man-made rings, and hundreds if not thousands of planets both rocky and gracious with trillions more moons, entire galaxies worth of planetary systems stuck inside one system.

And yet.

When Adam looked at that star..... he felt like he knew it. As shocked as he was he was not surprised.

The sun glowing over his skin, the warmth and the light, it was all..... so familiar.

It was home.

And he knew it for what it was, Heaven, Valhalla, Elysium, Svarga Loka, Tia, Aaru, axis and more names that fled his mind in a torrent, every word ever associated with heaven and more, some in alien languages he couldn't describe and had never even heard before.

But to him one word came to mind.

It wasn't an English word, or a word in any language he understood, but his mind translated it to

Revelation

It was not the exact term for this star, not entirely accurate and didn't encompass the true meaning. Somehow the word felt, too small to fit, but it was as good as it was going to get.

"Revelation."

Adam turned his head to find Maverick sitting up on her knees face covered by her helmet, but the awe in her posture was enough.

She had reached the same conclusion he did.

All around the ship the stars muttered name was spoken independently from a thousand lips.

They were home.

And they were here to track mud on god's carpet.